Five Strange Substances Perfumers Use to Make Aromas

Photo: Mauricio Alejo

You smell like whale vomit. But don’t worry—it’s just your new eau de toilette doing its job. Perfumers have long relied on odd ingredients to create swoony scents, and in November some of the best examples will be on exhibit in The Art of Scent, 1889-2012, at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. (Yes, you’ll be able to take a whiff.) Perfumers “manipulate their audience in the way that all artists do,” says Chandler Burr, the museum’s curator of olfactory art. Here are a few of the substances that will smell up the show.